My work comes from looking at what is around me. I like to use familial subjects because I feel that there is significance to them that I can discover without parsing it out beforehand. There is an aspect of a personal chronicle to my work in that it contains my family and the places in which we find ourselves; but in regard to the making of the work, I think of these as a backdrop to something that I find visually compelling. This can be something I initially observe or something I discover when arranging a composition. There are the initial colors, shapes and light that I see, and then there is what happens to them when I take a photograph or make a drawing or a painting. A synthesis takes place between these two. I am persuaded by the characteristics of my materials, and I stop short of fully articulating my subject. Instead I try to make colors hum and shapes speak for themselves. I look to avoid conventional images without abandoning conventional subjects. My goal is that the work is multi-dimensional, that it exists simultaneously as personal history, textural surfaces, and constructed images. "I grew up as the middle of five kids. We would yearly visit my grandmother in Alabama and later in Tennessee. She was an artist and her house was full of paintings, which was formative to my belief in being an artist myself at an early age. My father was an architect, but he also made paintings when he was younger, and these always hung in our home. He and my mom have been a guiding force for our family. My painting "Porch Reader” is an image of him studying...For me, he is a great role model, as a father and husband. My work can be a reflection on this challenge as I include my family, my wife and kids, in it. I am particularlyinfluenced by Pierre Bonnard and Fairfield Porter, both of whom include family while simultaneously dealing with issues of abstraction." Ben Frederick is an artist and teacher from Dayton, Ohio. He received his MFA in painting from Edinboro University in 2018. He teaches at Miami University Regionals and Indiana University East. His recent achievements include being selected for the upcoming New American Paintings, No. 143, Midwest Issue. Ben’s work includes observational and imagined images of daily life, which are manifested through drawing, collage, and oil paintings. His work explores the intersection of light, color, observation and invention. Ben lives in Dayton with his wife and three children.